my favorite jordan card. /rambly story

[riveraXVX]

figured I don't really post a lot here.... been far too busy as of late. would do my part to put a few on the board tonight!

firstly I should point out I'm not a basketball collector, and other than my niche lil jordan collection of variations of this card I own maybe 6 other jordan cards total. secondly you may have seen me post about this card or collection on some other forums.

without further ado...my favorite Michael Jordan card!


the year was 1990, I was a ten year old kid living at the time I believe in columbia SC. the location was the crappy flea market my parents ran an electronic repair booth in on the weekends. my time was spent with the jolly old cigar smoking card vendor named Pete. i'd hustle selling stuff at our booth (mostly random auction unit toy finds, and random ninja turtles stuff of mine) to make a few bucks, then bolt over to his booth to blow it as fast as I made it.

we routinely played pack wars for cheap packs of cards, I believe these 1990-91 hoops packs were 50 cents each. he'd play those with the kids and make sure he kept going double or nothing until the kids would win a nice stack of cards. one day after blowing about $5 on these cards (I was working on my first complete set!) went back to our booth, and sat under the table sorting and putting them in my binder. upon flipping over a page I noticed a reggie white football card had been slipped into there.... kinda weird I didn't buy any football cards, nor did I own any. so flipped the page back to the front...hmm just hoops cards... back...pro set card... so i pulled the offending card out... reggie white pro set back, with michael jordan on the front?!

I'M RICH I TELL YA! STINKIN RICH! I'M GONNA BUY A MANSION WITH THIS THING ONE DAY MUWAHAHAHAHAH. I ran that thing all over to the vendors showing it off, showed it to any basketball collectors showed it to the card shops... oh yeah that thing was awesome! got offered between $50 and $500 for it at the time.. but once again this was the height of errors being the hottest thing around! I think my original plan then was trying to sell it to jordan....WHY SELL IT FOR $500 NOW, WHEN I CAN SELL IT FOR ONE MILLION IN 20 YEARS!

so yes needless to say, twenty-one years have passed, and I didn't sell it last year, nor am I posting this from my space-yacht that the sale of the card funded.

instead I got out of collecting in 1995 and kept it tucked away at my moms house, then three years ago upon buying a different wrongbacked version of the jordan on ebay as a bday gift to myself (see: nostalgia) i ended up swooping the collection back up. I had also just started watching baseball again at this point....the fever overwhelmed me and I've been a hopeless card/braves addict since.

this is still not only my favorite basketball card but my favorite card I own 21 years later. you can see the variety of other versions of this card we own here also: jordan collection

[clarkesk82]

oh my...how much do you think it would sell for right now?

[riveraXVX]

I scour ebay a few times daily for a few different jordan search terms (well that and some other non jordan stuff we stalk) to try to hunt down any/all errors to keep an eye on / find more for our collection. hard to really judge. a lot of his 90s cards that were of nicer inserts with errors in nice condition can fetch quite a decent chunk of money.

wrong backs like this really don't normally have a big premium unless its a key card or key insert of a star player. but with how unusual this one is I'm thinking $100-150 range? could go for a lot more could fizzle and be $50 hard to tell!

a BGS 9.5 normal copy of the card sells for around $150 now (which is crazy we bought ours for $35 best offer like a year ago) If I ever did try to sell it I'd imagine it going for around that.

I've seen a total of around 10 of these errors in the past 3 years, and none previous to that. all of which were no name players and were the inverse they had pro set front / nba hoops backs a seller on ebay who had got them from his fathers collection who had been a big error collector had them I think most of the no name players sold for around $8-10 each..wish I woulda had cash to buy them at the time just to have them

[jywilli69]

That is a pretty cool card there. I have never seen one like that.

[Hands]

Cool card to see!
Thanks for sharing.

Just wondering if you have ever thought about cracking open that slab?

[cardjim]

Great story John. Nice Links. thanks for posting.
I do remember when Pro Set had this state of the art printing plant around Dallas and did a lot of the other companies printing jobs. Seems like there were quite a few of those mixed up backs back then.

[riveraXVX]

Great story John. Nice Links. thanks for posting.
I do remember when Pro Set had this state of the art printing plant around Dallas and did a lot of the other companies printing jobs. Seems like there were quite a few of those mixed up backs back then.

yep! pro set almost entered into the basketball card market in 1991 also, they did around 10 prototype examples including jordan...which actually contained the same exact image as from this hoops card which is one of the pricier/harder to find jordan cards out there. my personal "theory" on how this card came to be is that it was an example of an employee(s) going "whoops errors" "whoops they made their way into packs" as a hype booster. or perhaps they were just sheets ran for calibration/testing the presses which then either mistakenly or "whoops how'd that get in there"d there way into packs.

just unfortunate for them, this one that it ended up in the hands of a 10 year old from SC who did nothing but hype it locally haha.

@hands- nope I had it graded around 2 years ago with BGS more just to get it slabbed as being real and BGS was the only "reputable" grading house who would grade it and actually mark it as being a misprinted back. if I would have known at the time that they can just slab stuff as being authentic I probably would have just got it labeled as such instead. the 5.5 is unattractive but I do like that it shows overall it would be an 8.5 if not for the horrid offcenter cut of the back (i severely underestimated how bad that would tank the overall score being a total newbie to graded cards at the time)

a couple of the other wrong backs we have...amazing how many different wrong ways they can manage to screw up one card:






then have the regular cards: BGS 9.5, BGS 8.5, BGS 8 (old + new label), and BGS 7.5 (old + new label)

had another graded card for $20 from ebay that was missing all the black print on the front of the card but got swiped from our mailbox

I pretty much pick up any cheap BGS grade of this that pops up I think most of those < 9.5 were like $3-6PPD each